I
Though it is easier, and perhaps far better, not to begin at all, yet if
a beginning is made it is there that most care is needed. Everything is
inherent in the genesis. So I have to record the simple genesis of this
affair as a winter morning after rain. There was more rain to come. The
sky was waterlogged and the grey ceiling, overstrained, had sagged and
dropped to the level of the chimneys. If one of them had pierced it! The
danger was imminent.
That day was but a thin solution of night. You know those November
mornings with a low, corpse-white east where the sunrise should be, as
though the day were still-born. Looking to the dayspring, there is what
we have waited for, there the end of our hope, prone and shrouded. This
morning of mine was such a morning. The world was very quiet, as though
it were exhausted after tears. Beneath a broken gutter-spout the rain
(all the night had I listened to its monody) had discovered a nest of
pebbles in the path of my garden in a London suburb. It occurs to you at
once that a London garden, especially in winter, should have no place in
a narrative which tells of the sea and the jungle. But it has much to do
with it. It is part of the heredity of this book. It is the essence of
this adventure of mine that it began on the kind of day which so
commonly occurs for both of us in the year's assortment of days. My
garden, on such a morning, is a necessary feature of the narrative, and
much as I should like to skip it and get to sea, yet things must be
taken in the proper order, and the garden comes first. There it was: the
blackened dahlias, the last to fall, prone in the field where death had
got all things under his feet. My pleasaunce was a dark area of soddened
relics; the battalions of June were slain, and their bodies in the mud.
That was the prospect in life I had. How was I to know the Skipper had
returned from the tropics? Standing in the central mud, which also was
black, surveying that forlorn end to devoted human effort, what was
there to tell me the Skipper had brought back his tramp steamer from the
lands under the sun? I knew of nothing to look forward to but December,
with January to follow. What should you and I expect after November, but
the next month of winter? Should the cultivators of London backs look
for adventures, even though they have read old Hakluyt? What are the
Americas to us, the Amazon and the Orinoco, Barbados and Panama, and
Port Royal, but tales that are told? We have never been nearer to them,
and now know we shall never be nearer to them, than that hill in our
neighbourhood which gives us a broad prospect of the sunset. There is as
near as we can approach. Thither we go and ascend of an evening, like
Moses, except for our pipe. It is all the escape vouchsafed us. Did we
ever know the chain to give? The chain has a certain length--we know it
to a link--to that ultimate link, the possibilities of which we never
strain. The mean range of our chain, the office and the polling booth.
What a radius! Yet it cannot prevent us ascending that hill which looks,
with uplifted and shining brow, to the far vague country whence comes
the last of the light, at dayfall.
It is necessary for you to learn that on my way to catch the 8.35 that
morning--it is always the 8.35--there came to me no premonition of
change. No portent was in the sky but the grey wrack. I saw the hale and
dominant gentleman, as usual, who arrives at the station in a brougham
drawn by two grey horses. He looked as proud and arrogant as ever, for
his face is as a bull's. He had the usual bunch of scarlet geraniums in
his coat, and the stationmaster assisted him into an apartment, and his
footman handed him a rug; a routine as stable as the hills, this. If
only the solemn footman would, one morning, as solemnly as ever, hurl
that rug at his master, with the umbrella to crash after it! One could
begin to hope then. There was the pale girl in black who never, between
our suburb and the city, lifts her shy brown eyes, benedictory as they
are at such a time, from the soiled book of the local public library,
and whose umbrella has lost half its handle, a china nob. (I think I
will write this book for her.) And there were all the others who catch
that train, except the young fellow with the cough. Now and then he does
miss it, using for the purpose, I have no doubt, that only form of
rebellion against its accursed tyranny which we have yet learned,
physical inability to catch it. Where that morning train starts from is
a mystery; but it never fails to come for us, and it never takes us
beyond the city, I well know.
I have a clear memory of the newspapers as they were that morning. I had
a sheaf of them, for it is my melancholy business to know what each is
saying. I learned there were dark and portentous matters, not actually
with us, but looming, each already rather larger than a man's hand. If
certain things happened, said one half the papers, ruin stared us in the
face. If those thing did not happen, said the other half, ruin stared us
in the face. No way appeared out of it. You paid your half-penny and
were damned either way. If you paid a penny you got more for your money.
Boding gloom, full-orbed, could be had for that. There was your extra
value for you. I looked round at my fellow passengers, all reading the
same papers, and all, it could be reasonably presumed, with
fore-knowledge of catastrophe. They were indifferent, every one of them.
I suppose we have learned, with some bitterness, that nothing ever
happens but private failure and tragedy, unregarded by our fellows
except with pity. The blare of the political megaphones, and the
sustained panic of the party tom-toms, have a message for us, we may
suppose. We may be sure the noise means something. So does the butcher's
boy when the sheep want to go up a side turning. He makes a noise. He
means something, with his warning cries. The driving uproar has a
purpose. But we have found out (not they who would break up side
turnings, but the people in the second class carriages of the morning
train) that now, though our first instinct is to start in a panic, when
we hear another sudden warning shout, there is no need to do so. And
perhaps, having attained to that more callous mind which allows us to
stare dully from the carriage window though with that urgent din in our
ears, a reasonable explanation of the increasing excitement and flushed
anxiety of the great Statesmen and their fuglemen may occur to us, in a
generation or two. Give us time! But how they wish they were out of it,
they who need no more time, but understand.
I put down the papers with their calls to social righteousness pitched
in the upper register of the tea-tray, their bright and instructive
interviews with flat earthers, and with the veteran who is topically
interesting because, having served one master fifty years, and reared
thirteen children on fifteen shillings a week, he has just begun to draw
his old age pension. (There's industry, thrift, and success, my little
dears!) One paper had a column account of the youngest child actress in
London, her toys and her philosophy, initialed by one of our younger
brilliant journalists. All had a society divorce case, with sanitary
elisions. Another contained an amusing account of a man working his way
round the world with a barrel on his head. Again, the young prince, we
were credibly informed in all the papers of that morning, did stop to
look in at a toy-shop window in Regent Street the previous afternoon. So
like a boy, you know, and yet he is a prince of course. The matter could
not be doubted. The report was carefully illustrated. The prince stood
on his feet outside the toy shop, and looked in.
To think of the future as a modestly long series of such prone mornings,
dawns unlit by heaven's light, new days to which we should be awakened
always by these clamant cockcrows bringing to our notice what the
busy-ness of our fellows had accomplished in nests of intelligent and
fruitful china eggs, was enough to make one stand up in the carriage,
horrified, and pull the communication cord. So I put down the papers and
turned to the landscape. Had I known the Skipper was back from below the
horizon--but I did not know. So I must go on to explain that that
morning train did stop, with its unfailing regularity, and not the least
hint of reprieve, at the place appointed in the Schedule. Soon I was at
work, showing, I hope, the right eager and concentrated eye, dutifully
and busily climbing the revolving wheel like the squirrel; except,
unluckier than that wild thing so far as I know, I was clearly
conscious, whatever the speed, the wheel remained forever in the same
place. Looking up to sigh through the bars after a long spin there was
the Skipper smiling at me.
I saw an open door. I got out. It was as though the world had been
suddenly lighted, and I could see a great distance.
We stood in Fleet Street later, interrupting the tide. The noise of the
traffic came to me from afar, for the sailor was telling me he was
sailing soon, and that he was taking his vessel an experimental voyage
through the tropical forests of the Amazon. He was going to Para, and
thence up the main stream as far as Manaos, and would then attempt to
reach a point on the Madeira river near Bolivia, 800 miles above its
junction with the greater river. It would be a noble journey. They would
see Obydos and Santarem, and the foliage would brush their rigging at
times, so narrow would be the way, and where they anchored at night the
jaguars would come to drink. This to me, and I have read Humboldt, and
Bates, and Spruce, and Wallace. As I listened my pipe went out.
It was when we were parting that the sailor, who is used to far horizons
and habitually deals with affairs in a large way because his standards
in his own business are the skyline and the meridian, put to me the most
searching question I have had to answer since the city first caught and
caged me. He put it casually when he was striking a match for a cigar,
so little did he himself think of it.
"Then why," said he, "don't you chuck it?"
What, escape? I had never thought of that. It is the last solution which
would have occurred to me concerning the problem of captivity. It is a
credit to you and to me that we do not think of our chains so
disrespectfully as to regard them as anything but necessary and
indispensable, though sometimes, sore and irritated, we may bite at
them. As if servitude fell to our portion like squints, parents poor in
spirit, green fly, reverence for our social superiors, and the other
consignments from the stars. How should we live if not in bonds? I have
never tried. I do not remember, in all the even and respectable history
of my family, that it has ever been tried. The habit of obedience, like
our family habit of noses, is bred in the bone. The most we have ever
done is to shake our fists at destiny; and I have done most of that.
"Give it up," said the Skipper, "and come with me."
With a sad smile I lifted my foot heavily and showed him what had me
round the ankle. "Poo," he said. "You could berth with the second mate.
There's room there. I could sign you on as purser. You come."